Making the effort

The kitchen has been fairly quiet around here lately. We cook, I swear, but it isn't anything to write home about. Most of it is stuff you've already seen - we fall into ruts when we're busy. Frequently we don't make it into the kitchen until 8:30 at which point it's too dark to get any photos even if we were making anything worth telling you about. But we still enjoy it.

{pizza prep}

About the unnecessary plating that I do - you would think that pre-plating (and creating extra dishes) would make cooking more stressful, but I like it. It slows me down, it reminds me that everyday meals are special.  Sometimes the plating takes the place of actual cooking.

{a simple dinner from last summer}

We even do this when we eat frozen pot stickers (um, at least once a week, if we're being honest). No, I did not bother to make any side dishes, but we do have three different kinds of soy sauce, tempura dipping sauce and rice vinegar. That kind of counts.

{gyoza night - photo and plating by D}

The white platters are from Crate and Barrel about a million years ago and I don't think they make these exact ones anymore. But honestly, I think I'd like to add the cuatro platters from CB2 to my collection, because they look like an even better version. The little prep bowls are mostly from Crate and Barrel as well. When D and I moved in together my mom surprised us with an enormous box filled with an assortment of prep bowls. We use them for prep, but also for serving sauces.

There are limits, of course. My emergency meal* is peanut butter, eaten by the spoonful and adorned with chocolate chips. There's no way to dress that one up, so I just eat it out of the jar.

{peanut butter + chocolate chips}

*An emergency meal is what you eat when you arrive home from work and you are dying. Ideally, an emergency meal should provide actual sustenance (pickles, though tempting, do not work well), should not require heating or chopping and must be able to be eaten with a single utensil or your fingers.